Math Guy gets it. The worst thing about Saxon, from the perspective of teachers
who first told me about it in the early 1990s, was how patronizing and insulting
it is. It fits very well into the anti-education school model of teaching as
purely a function of following a script (see Direct Instruction and its
imitators). And the problem remains as Dr. H. H. Wu pointed out: it gives a very
narrow and distorted picture of what mathematics is that will not serve students
well if they hope to study higher math. Given that the ones most usually pushing
Saxon are supposed to be concerned that reform approaches don't give kids the
tools to do higher math, this is a very curious shortcoming.

This material is based upon work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant DUE-0226284.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author(s)
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation.